I was talking to a business contact recently about a blog post they’d written. His first response was: ‘I bet you’re going to tell me I’ve got it all wrong.’ Which started me thinking: does right or wrong have any meaning whatsoever in content marketing?
The article he was talking about was actually quite good. It was easy to read, it had a point and it was clearly aimed at his target customers. The fact that he thought somebody might be sitting in judgement on his efforts possibly explains why some people find it difficult to get started with content marketing. Is there a secret rule book they’ve never seen that others will use to determine what’s ‘right’ and what’s ‘wrong’?
In my view, right and wrong are irrelevant concepts in content marketing. Your content can always be better (by which I mean more effective) but it is not wrong (whatever that means). It will never be perfect.
What do I mean by this?
Content marketing is fundamentally about creating things that your customers want to engage with. The effectiveness of your content boils down to the level of engagement you get and how this eventually translates into sales. That’s it; nothing else really matters.
If, one way or another, with varying levels of expertise, this is what people are setting out to achieve, they’re already partially ‘right’ no matter how well produced their content is.
That’s also why it will never be perfect. You’ll always find that some subjects and some approaches get a better response than others. Learn from that experience and do more of the things people like and less of the things they don’t. But, at the same time, never be scared of experimenting with something new.
One thing’s for sure, if you never get started, you’ll never know what you could have achieved.
Headlines
Titles are a classic example. Even when you grasp the importance of a strong headline and how it has to make your content appeal to specific people in a huge crowd, you still need to try out different subject lines and different words to find the ones that work best. You’ll never find the perfect headline but you can gradually get closer to it using a mixture of intuition and experimentation.
For B2B marketing I believe the focus should be on authenticity and value. If you are using your content to pass on things that you know about, and the expertise and knowledge you’ve accumulated through doing what you do, who can possibly say that’s wrong?
Content written with conviction and clarity should always be the aim. And both of these factors are somewhere on a scale rather than being a simple pass or fail. A professional writer will probably do a better job when it comes to clarity but we can’t substitute for your knowledge, experience and passion.
Skilful writing makes a difference, of course it does, but something written inexpertly about something I care about is going to hold my attention better than beautiful prose about not much at all.
Some things have been shown to work most of the time, such as writing shorter sentences and breaking up text with paragraphs and headings, but that doesn’t make longer sentences wrong in all cases.
Is your content hitting the target?
Aim to target your content at the things that inspire and interest your customers. You won’t hit the bullseye every time but the more you practise, and the more you analyse results and feedback, the closer you’ll get more often.
The nearest thing to ‘wrong’ you can do is to focus on what interests you rather than what interests your customers. But even here there ought to be some degree of overlap, otherwise why would they be your customers? Nudge yourself closer to perfection by centring your content more in their space and less in yours.
So if it’s fear of getting things wrong that’s holding you back, stop worrying. Concentrate on how your expertise can benefit the people you want to do business with and leave the literary criticism to the Sunday papers.
The more content you create, and the more you are prepared to learn from the experience, the more effective your content marketing will become. It will never be perfect but don’t let anyone tell you it’s wrong either.
Richard Hussey, RSH Copywriting
Content writer, blogger and helpful person.
Call me on 01823 674167 or email richard@rshcopywriting if you want to get started with content marketing or want to get better at it.
main image: Daniel Kulinski via Compfight